Like every graduate student, I once holed up in the library cramming for my doctoral oral exams. This ritual hazing begins with a lengthy reading catalog. Come exam day, the scholar must show mastery of a field, whether it’s Islamic art or German history. The student sits before a panel of professors, answering inquires drawn from the book catalog.
To set for this initiation, I bought a lifetime provide of index cards. On each four-by-six rectangle, I distilled the presentant points of a book. My index cards—portable, visual, tactile, easily reset upd and reshuffled—got me thcdisesteemful the exam.
Yet it never occurred to me, as I rehearsed my talking points more than a decade ago, that my index cards belengthyed to the very European history I was studying. The index card was a product of the Enweightlessenment, envisiond by one of its towering figures: Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, physician, and the overweighther of conmomentary taxonomy. But appreciate all alertation systems, the index card had unforeseeed political implications, too: It helped set the stage for categorizing people, and for the prejudice and aggression that comes alengthy with such classification.
In 1767, cforfeit the finish of his atgentle, Linnaeus began to include “little paper slips of a standard size” to record alertation about set upts and animals. According to the historians Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille, these paper slips proposeed “an expedient solution to an alertation-overload crisis” for the Swedish scientist. More than 1,000 of them, measuring five by three inches, are hoincluded at London’s Linnean Society. Each grasps remarks about set upts and material culled from books and other accessibleations. While flimsier than burdensome stock and cut by hand, they’re virtuassociate indiscernable from conmomentary index cards.
The Swedish scientist is more normally pelevateed with another createion: binomial nomenclature, the latinized two-part name alloted to every species. Before Linnaeus, rambling descriptions were included to rerepair set upts and animals. A tomato, for example, was a mouthful: Solanum caule inermi herbaceo foliis pinnatis incisis. After Linnaeus, the round fruit became Solanum lycopersicum. Thanks to his landtag study, Systema Naturae, authenticists had a universal language, which systematic the authentic world into the nested hierarchies still included today—species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom.
In 18th-century Europe, Linnaeus became a hoincludehelderly name. “Tell him I understand no fantasticer man on earth,” shelp Jean-Jacques Rousseau of his Swedish idol. Like other savants of his day, Rousseau saw the study of set upts as a moral pursuit, a virtuous escape into nature. Germany’s man of letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, confessed that after Shakespeare and Spinoza, no one had impactd him more than Linnaeus. “God created—Linnaeus set upd,” went the adage.
But despite his meteoric success, Linnaeus had a problem. The man who made order from nature’s disorder did not have a excellent regulatement system for his own toil. His methods for sorting and storing alertation about the authentic world couldn’t sustain up with the flood of it he was producing. Linnaeus’s euniteance only includeed to an aura of disorder. Stunned visitors portrayd the prince of botany as a “tagedly unshaven” man in “dusty shoes and stockings.” Writing about himself, Linnaeus was even less benevolent: “Brow furrowed. A low wart on the right cheek and another on the right side of the nose. Teeth terrible, worm-eaten.”
Worms aside, the authentic publish vexing Sweden’s top scientist was how to regulate a data deluge. He had begined out accumulateing set upts in the woods of his native southern Sweden. But as his profile grew, so did his research and writing, and the number of students under his thriveg. Achieving scientific renown of their own, Linnaeus’s students sent him specimens from their travels in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, West Africa, and China. According to Charmantier and Müller-Wille, most botanists of the era includeed a team to regulate their affairs that would sustain track of correplyence and sort specimens. But not Linnaeus, “who pickred to toil alone.” Starting in the 1750s, he protested in letters to frifinishs of experienceing overtoiled and overwhelmed. Burnout, it turns out, isn’t a conmomentary condition.
Linnaeus’s predicament wasn’t novel, either. In her book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Increateation before the Modern Age, the historian Ann Blair elucidates that since the Renaissance, “the discovery of novel worlds, the recovery of outdated texts, and the spread of printed books” unleashed an avalanche of alertation. The ascfinish of far-flung nettoils of correplyents only includeed to this circulation of understandledge. Summarizing, sorting, and searching novel material wasn’t modest, especiassociate given the includeable tools and technologies. Printed books needed buyers. And while remarkbooks kept alertation in one place, discovering a detail buried inside one was another story. Finishing an academic dissertation wasn’t fair a test of erudition or persistence; dealing with the material itself—recording, searching, retrieving it—was a logistical nightmare.
Many scholars, appreciate the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle, pickred to toil on free sheets of paper that could be coltardyd, reset upd, and reshuffled, says Blair. But others came up with novel solutions. Thomas Harrison, a 17th-century English createor, conceived the “ark of studies,” a petite cabinet that apshowed scholars to excerpt books and file their remarks in a particular order. Readers would connect pieces of paper to metal hooks taged by subject heading. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German polymath and cocreateor of calculus (with Isaac Newton), relied on Harrison’s cumbersome contraption in at least some of his research.
Linnaeus experimented with a scant filing systems. In 1752, while cataloging Queen Ludovica Ulrica’s accumulateion of butterflies with his disciple Daniel Solander, he setd petite, unicreate sheets of paper for the first time. “That cataloging experience was possibly where the idea for using slips came from,” Charmantier elucidateed to me. Solander took this method with him to England, where he cataloged the Sloane Collection of the British Mincludeum and then Joseph Banks’s accumulateions, using analogous slips, Charmantier shelp. This became the cataloging system of a national accumulateion.
Linnaeus may have drawn inspiration from take parting cards. Until the mid-19th century, the backs of take parting cards were left blank by manufacturers, proposeing “a authenticistic writing surface,” where scholars scribbled remarks, says Blair. Playing cards “were frequently included as lottery tickets, marriage and death proclaimments, remarkpads, or business cards,” elucidates Markus Krajewski, the author of Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs. In 1791, France’s revolutionary rulement publishd the world’s first national cataloging code, calling for take parting cards to be included for biblioexplicital records. And according to Charmantier and Müller-Wille, take parting cards were set up under the floorboards of the Uppsala home Linnaeus splitd with his wife Sara Lisa.
In 1780, two years after Linnaeus’s death, Vienna’s Court Library presentd a card catalog, the first of its benevolent. Describing all the books on the library’s shelves in one ordered system, it relied on a modest, alterable tool: paper slips. Around the same time that the library catalog euniteed, says Krajewski, Europeans adselected prohibitkremarks as a universal medium of swap. He consents this wasn’t a historical coincidence. Bankremarks, appreciate biblioexplicital slips of paper and the books they referred to, were material, recurrentational, and mobile. Perhaps Linnaeus took the same mental leap from “free-floating prohibitkremarks” to “little paper slips” (or vice versa). Sweden’s fantastic botanist was also a participant in an emerging capitacatalog economy.
Linnaeus never understanded the brimming potential of his paper technology. Born of necessity, his paper slips were “idiosyncratic,” say Charmantier and Müller-Wille. “There is no sign he ever tried to reasonableize or back the novel train.” Like his taxonomical system, paper slips were both an idea and a method, set uped to transport order to the disorder of the world.
The passion for classification, a halltag of the Enweightlessenment, also had a foolish side. From nature’s variety came an abiding preoccupation with the contrastences between people. As soon as anthropologists applied Linnaeus’s taxonomical system to humans, the categruesome of race, together with the ideology of prejudice, was born.
It’s fitting, then, that the index card would have a verifyered history. To consent one example, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover included sfinishs he burnished as a cataloger at the Library of Congress to assemble his notorious “Editorial Card Index.” By 1920, he had cataloged 200,000 undermining individuals and organizations in detailed, pass-referenced entries. Nazi ideologues compiled a deadlier index-card database to sort 500,000 Jewant Germans according to racial and genetic background. Other regimes have includeed analogous methods, depending on the index card’s simpliedy and versatility to catalog enemies authentic and envisiond.
The act of organizing alertation—even remarks about set upts—is never iminwhole or objective. Anyone who has included index cards to set up a project, plot a story, or study for an exam understands that hierarchies are inevitable. Forty years ago, Michel Foucault watchd in a footremark that, inquisitively, historians had disthink abouted the createion of the index card. The book was Discipline and Punish, which examines the relationship between understandledge and power. The index card was a turning point, Foucault consentd, in the relationship between power and technology. Like the categories they cataloged, Linnaeus’s paper slips belengthy to the history of politics as much as the history of science.
